Knock AI Story OS

Smart Projector

Features

AI partner for your Kids

Key features to help you DIY Fairy Tales, Bedtime stories, Picture book and even generate songs for your kids!

With the Creator token, you can custom create your own content for your kids. You could also browse other works on our Story OS.

Unlimited Storybooks

Remote control

Multi-platform Compatibility

IOS and Android App Available:

Product Spec

Rewards

Product Development 

Hardware:

Currently, hardware development has finished. We kicked off our First batch assembly:

App & Software:

We have launched the IOS and Android App:

Timeline

Knock AI vs Other Solutions

Shipping

About the Team and Why we created Knock AI

The founders of Knock Knock Fairytales are a pair of Chinese high school brothers, Chris and Tony. Their initial intention for this project stemmed from an educational public welfare project that Chris and Tony participated in near their school.

They found that the reason why many children from poor families wander the streets and idle around is actually the lack of good educational resources.

"The core concept of this project is not to charge for education. We hope that education can be as fair as possible, so that children can choose what kind of educational opportunities they want to receive.  With the possibly limited company of their parents, they can guide their own lives," said Chris Lai.

Currently, Knock Knock Fairytales (Knock AI) has been launched on WeChat Mini Program, App Store, and Google Play, and users can use it for free. The app has accumulated over 100,000 readers in China and 2,000-3,000 registered active users.

The app has also been downloaded over a thousand times in the US market. In terms of investment, the company has received RMB 3 million in financing, including a US$250,000 investment from Google Cloud.

Let AI tell stories in just 3 minutes

The Knock Knock AI Mini Program has set up two entrances for children and parents respectively. After selecting their identities, they will enter different operation modes:

And at night, parents can also use a projector to project the story onto the ceiling and lie comfortably in bed with their children to enjoy bedtime. With the team's deeply adapted StoryOS and the hardware under development, the projected image can even spread to the entire room, allowing children to enter the fairy tale world they created themselves.

"The combination with the new hardware is not simply installing a software, but overturning the design of existing devices, re-adapting and scheduling the AI, making it easy for children to use, and ultimately presenting a new interactive mode different from projectors or TVs," said hardware designer Gao Ruotong.

Compared to other AI education and companion products, what makes Knock Knock Fairytales unique as a storyteller lies in its "intangibility." Zuo Dewei, the technical director of Knock Knock Fairytales, explained to Intelligent Emergence: "Almost everyone has an imaginary friend in their growth. The key is not in the 'friend,' but in the 'imaginary'."

He believes that many AI applications based on large models that give specific images to this imaginary friend will actually limit children's imagination. "If I really give it a voice, an intelligence, it will suddenly become very creepy."

On the contrary, they hope that AI can become a "crutch" for children's creativity, helping them to visualize their ideas one by one and preserve them in the form of personalized data for a long time, recording the growth of children's thinking and creativity.

Secondly, due to the operation mechanism of existing large models based on probability prediction rather than actual understanding, the problem of "hallucination" (generating seemingly reasonable but actually inaccurate or completely fabricated information) cannot be avoided.

To address this issue, Knock Knock Fairytales takes steps such as keyword shielding to ensure that the content is harmless to children's health, while allowing the AI to maintain maximum freedom in story creation. For example, when a character travels from point A to point B, Knock Knock Fairytales only makes the scene switching and the character's actions conform to the logic of the real world, rather than being limited to preset scenes and paths like game systems.

"The path of a character in a game is fixed, and the scene switching must be reasonable. In this case, it cannot complete too many steps through AI, and it must be controlled by humans. But we don't need to control AI, AI can fully utilize its full creative talent, we just have to let it not do anything."

Finally, back to AI story creation itself, it is not easy for ordinary people to make large language models tell novel stories like fairy tale experts.

On the one hand, this is due to the lack of prompt writing ability of ordinary people, who cannot fully guide the large model. On the other hand, it is because ordinary large models have not received enough high-quality fairy tale creation training, resulting in a small number of output content that meets expectations and low quality.

In fact, the creation of fairy tales is very difficult in itself - an excellent children's story contains a complex structure, not only must be logical, full of plot, in line with children's cognitive and understanding level, but also full of imagination and freshness, both profound connotation and interpretability, so as to entertain and educate.

This has also become a major difficulty in the development process of the Knock Knock Fairytales team.

Faced with the problem of giving the AI Little Mermaid an "immortal soul," the Knock Knock Fairytales creative team solved it this way:

First, let the large language model undergo multiple rounds of deep training, and the training dataset consists of classic stories that have entered the public domain and children's stories, picture books, illustrations and other related content created by the creative team themselves.  The model learns many of the creative rules of children's stories and illustrations, forming a personality system that can imitate human creators.

After that, the team designed and optimized the entire event flow from user demand to the final output of the picture book:

After receiving the user's voice or text requirements, the large language model within Knock Knock Fairytales will first create a story skeleton based on the input variables, and then "grow flesh" based on the skeleton.

These results are then processed by a deeply trained model for style adjustment and polishing, and finally form a text that can be converted into voice and illustrations, building a complete multimedia picture book experience for children. The team leader said that Knock Knock Fairytales will also launch a video function in the future to allow children to immerse themselves in the picture book story.

It is worth mentioning that Knock Knock Fairytales has also launched a "voice customization" function that allows AI to tell stories to children on behalf of parents, supporting almost all mainstream languages.

With just a sentence of voice from parents, Knock Knock Fairytales can use their voices to tell the stories created by their children, and in the beta version, parents can even independently voice the narration and characters of the story.

This function will only appear in the storytelling session and will not cover all voice interaction scenarios in the app, avoiding the "uncanny valley effect" of AI saying unusual words in the parents' voices. In this way, the AI-created story is told through the mouths of the parents, which can add a bit more intimacy and "human touch."

Next, the Knock Knock Fairytales team will rapidly iterate on the product at the software and hardware levels.

In the future, what Knock Knock Fairytales hopes to achieve is to allow every child to have their own personalized echo box to record their precious cornerstone memories - every imaginary friend in their childhood, every "chuunibyo" story, and every colorful unicorn that may be forgotten when they grow up.

Associated Press